Oracle Blog

Sun, Systems and Solaris!

Saturday Nov 20, 2010

Solaris 11 Express is now here for you to download! Keeping up the tradition of constant and relentless innovation, Solaris engineering team at Oracle has brought some great features into the hands of sysadmins, developers, IT managers and users. For this blog, I am pointing you to a particular Oracle Techcast video in which Rick Ramsey talks to Markus Flierl, Dan Price, and Liane Praza, from Solaris Core Engineering about what is new in Solaris 11 Express and discuss those features in depth which make the life of a Sysadmin and IT managers much easier!

This video is full of use cases and I strongly recommend you to watch the video if you want to learn more about how you and your organization can take advantage of the new features of Solaris 11 Express.

Just to give you a peek: Some of the features discussed in this video include

Solaris 11 Express can send you an email notification if a software of a hardware fails

How you can export a physical Solaris 10 instance into a Solaris 11 Express zone and run it without any modification

How you can do upgrades on Solaris 11 Express with a single command!

And of course, much more! Enjoy! And for more such informative videos, check out the Oracle Solaris Video blog!

Monday Jun 09, 2008

There can be many a times when you cannot afford to spend those valuable $$$ to prove your concept or express yourself or give you the start you are looking for Then where do you go?? Now that open source has become such a big thing, that I don't think I need to explicitly answer this question!! But then, identifying what application to use and where can get a bit daunting (As daunting as atleast 3 rounds of googling )!! Anyways, here I would like to recommend 5 open source application which can get you rolling with your concept.... Note that, each of these projects are mature enough that they can be used for every mission critical operations and you can trust them to run your whole business.

Netbeans is what you should be asking for if you are looking at creating any Rich Client Application quickly! Be it Database driven applications or a stand alone tiny application, Netbeans is the best choice for you! Anytime you wish to exploit the power of Java Technology then Netbeans is your man Not to forget, if you are planning to create a nifty mobile application which you can use to adore your cell phone then look nowhere else. Many other things like Ruby, C and C++ etc. runs smoothly!

Productivity suites can be really expensive. But OpenOffice.org is an amazing Office application which is very feature packed and complete. And the best thing is that it comes sans price tag! Direct PDF convertion, native support to the ODF and MS Office formats and hundreds of other features very much make OpenOffice.org a-must application!

Sun xVM (VirtualBox) would allow you to run anything on anything! Run OpenSolaris on Windows, Windows on OpenSolaris, Windows on Linux and Linux on Windows and many such other combinations! VirtualBox OSE would allow you to test your applications on whatever platform you want. With a download less than 25 MB, you are ready to go to install any platform in your system without actually needing to buy any separate hardware for each platform.

Now that you have a IDE and Office plus a virtualization application in place, you would need something to run your Website. Drupal is a right choice if you are looking for a contect driven website. Written using PHP and supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL, Drupal can me made as feature rich as possible, using thousands of community contributed module!

XAMPP would allow you to install the comple Apache, MySQL and PHP part of the xAMPP platform. Its a simple to use and easy to download!

The beauty of all these applications are that they run on almost all popular platforms! You are free to use which ever operating system you want to run these applications. They help you get off the ground easily. Infact, if you are smart enough, you would take the extra effort to get yourself a copy of OpenSolaris, which would cost you nothing and provide you a reliable, feature full and stable development environment. And if you are considering to do a next facebook or something then check out OpenSolaris Web Stack which would give you a SAMP platform on a platter!

These are some of the applications I like a lot in the OpenSource ecosystem. There are million others and almost any of your needs can be fulfilled in the OpenSource world!

Now tell me, doesn't open source deserve the title of biggest enabler of our century???

Wednesday Feb 27, 2008

Things are getting good to great at Worldwide Education and Research Conference 2008! I got a chance to interview Mr. Zack Urlocker, (for those who don't know, Zack is the Executive Vice President - Products, for MySQL) the dynamic leader of MySQL! Earlier in the evening, Zack was on the panel of "Enabling Communities" along with Barry Libert, the famous author of We are Smarter Than Me, and Michael Keller who is the University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources at Stanford University. For everyone in the hall, the session was so informative that I could as well call it an "Eye Opener".

In the interview, Zack told me many things about the business model around open source. Everyone knows that the best business model is that model in which each of its component are in a win-win situation. Zack very well justified how open source is exactly the same kind of model where every one is in a win-win!

Personally, I always felt that the way businesses around the globe are migrating towards the collaborative model for production and distribution, and with collaboration tools becoming more and more common amongst the internet users, the day is not far when everything will have to move towards the collaborative model. And after talking to Zack I'm even more convinced that if someone would like to remain close and try to make money the traditional way, then for them might be its a good time to take the message - either "Open Up" or, sorry to say but, "Close Down"!